Dark Seclusion
by Carbon Polygon
Summary: Tenacity and ideals are all that one has when clinging to their life in the epitome of seclusion when trapped in a facility of dark, lonely shadows. One-shot.


There was no sound. None, whatsoever. The entire facility was dead silent. No sounds emitted from anywhere, unless it was the distant sound of a particle ball bouncing of a wall and flying in the incident direction, or the sound of acid gurgling far below. Noise seemed to be retrained, with some cold hand gripping it's throat and ready to kill it if resonance squeezed from the grasp of the hands trying to suffocate it.

In the midst of this perpetual silence, there was the heavy, eerie feeling that someone or something was watching you. The feeling that something had it's eye on you, all the time. You could turn around in this paranoia, and see nor hear a soul-but still have that feeling, the almost telekinetic feeling that something was watching you.

Cameras with bright red lights would follow your motions, even further indicating you were not alone. They would be disabled if nobody was here. But if there was somebody else, then why would the large rooms overlooking the test areas be empty? Why would there be nobody overseeing you? Why? Was it all a clever trick made by the people who ran the place? Was it all just something to hype your paranoid side? Or was something else in charge of the facility, something that could watch you from afar? Something that had it's claws right above your back and ready to drag them through your flesh at the given time when you least expect it, but at a time you know may or may not even come. You can only hope, and pray, that that time is far from the present. You can only dream of being safe from the hideous feeling that something, with it's forever present and superintending eyes, that it will never dream of pouncing onto you from the shadows it hides in.

It knows. It knows you are afraid. If it exists, which is must, then it knows. The cameras change when you turn left, move up when you jump, and the shiny optics catch every movement your body has and send it to someone, or something. Something that is seeing your progress, and flexing it's claws, ready to strike. It doesn't know when, perhaps, but it does. It always does. It just needs time. When doing things on your own with nobody to command you, things of this sort take time. They take time to make full. When to end the life of the sentience that made the fuss to crawl behind the pipes, looking for an escape from the exceeding feeling of being watched. Creeping behind the rust and seeing the psychotic words scribbled across the wall, in what seems to be a man's own blood,

_The cake is a lie._

_The cake is a lie._

_The cake is a lie._

They see this cryptic work, and their eyes widen in horror. Maybe this isn't work of someone mentally deranged, perhaps. The unhinged scrawls caused them to leave the area feeling unsafe. The cameras that had been searching for motion snap at the endowment to once again gaze upon your movements. The red lights flicker as they focus on their prey, and the optics move in and out as they follow it. They are under the long, outstretched claws of whoever has control. It is no longer a matter of what, it is a matter of who. A matter of who is in control. A matter of who is in charge. It can't be a what now. It knows. That voice can't be coming from a thing-it's coming from a person. A machine couldn't be able to lure people to their death. Maybe the ignorant ones didn't believe it for a while, but it became all but their fear later on.

The first one was the survivor. The first one was the only survivor out of the ones who had died before in this sense of loneliness. Before, you knew that there were, somewhere. It was a fact. There was just something that had you beat in the inside, and was going to take your life...when was unknown. But you hoped it would be stopped. Even if you were alone with it. She was the first, truly, alone.

They said she couldn't be tested with. She was too stubborn, to resistant to the torments and the degraded words spilled across the walls. She had tenacity. She had the one thing they didn't. Tenacity. She made her life more important than even her personal feels, wants, and needs. She knew her life was important. She took the handheld portal device and set her goals. She went through torture just to have it trashed, however. She tried to survive through the death that would've surely awaited her in the suffocating loneliness, but she was damned if she did, and damned if she didn't, as the saying goes. Nothing could stop her from being once against brought into the depths.

* * *

Feeling the exhaust from the incinerator, she saw the last core fall into it can combust on it's way down. The heat flared in her face as she saw the antropical AI swing and curve, almost doubling over itself and twisting in a sheer force of anger, betrayal, and pain. Maybe to her it had been all along in her ideals to kill the woman who caused this reciprocation. She hadn't truly planned for this. The rockets really were the way to go, she said. Even with this threat, it was one of the last things she was able to say. She was running out of time. Running out of things to do, and even say. She could only muster the strength to keep doing what she was going, but as that final rocket hit and as the final core dropped off, she, GLaDOS, the very being of intellect, knew she was kaput. She couldn't keep going. Not after this. As she slowly felt herself die, she had the satisfaction of knowing that the test subject who had killed her wouldn't be going anywhere, either. There was that warm and fuzzy feeling that she'd be dragged in Aperture's bowels for a long stasis after this. A murderer like her would one day return. Maybe the AI would not. Maybe she would be dead for thousands of years before she made a return. Maybe this test subject, Chell, would be long gone by then.

Long gone, of course, but not without the help of something. Perhaps it's only reasonable to assume something would have to help her, and you couldn't leave without the help of the main AI of the facility herself.

It was just like humans to take advantage over AI. Maybe she could have expected nothing less from her species. Betrayal and hate were the only things that she had experienced out of them, and the only things she thought she would experience from them. After all, they had shown her no better. If she had not had a genetic lifeform inside her, then she wouldn't have a gender at all. Humans caused her pain, and she had her revenge, and was barley done. This human had done the worst. It wasn't white, electrical, simulated pain. This time, it was worse. It was being murdered, in cold hatred, by a human. She would have her vengeance in her rancor, and while she saw the last of the world, she knew to make that a priority.

But all of that was for years to come. The AI's black box feature activated. The last two minutes of her life came back to her. She had viewed that for thousands of years before any of that could be put to a good use.

* * *

As for the test subject herself, the sheer force of the AI exploding and combusting from the inside caused her to be dragged up with the AI.

On the way up, metal and scraps hit her from all directions, hitting and almost breaking and causing her severe pain. As she was coughed up out from the heart of Aperture Science, she looked up. Trees. The sky. Birds. If she didn't have swelling and pained joints, she would have ran through the parking lot and made her escape. Indeed, she's tried this, but now, the only thing she could do was feel herself go in and out of consciousness. Feeling something bleeding on her back, she still didn't give anything up. She tried to get up, and fell down...this time, hearing a crunch from her ankle. As she felt down on her backside and felt a splitting pain as she hit her bleeding back, she could only hear one thing, amidst the new sound of rustling tree leaves and birds,

"Thank you for assuming the Party Escort Submission Position."

At this, she felt something take her and drag her back into the facility. For how long, she knew not. Only that she had her hopes and dreams dashed. She felt everything leave her as she was dragged down back in Aperture, and everything she had worked to get into was now ruined, and always would she remember and she damaged by everything being ruined by this one event, and how she saw the outside once, for the first time in years. She had only hope, and only that remained along with her almost godly tenacity.

Years of hope, destroyed.

* * *

I decided to write something that would kind of take a dark tone. I hope this kind of worked out that way. I've been playing a bit of Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 lately, and decided I'd write something someone dark and as a satire to hopes being dashed.

If I have any spelling or grammatical errors, tell me, please. I'd be very obliged for constructive criticism.


End file.
